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Is This How to Breathe Life Into a City's Vacant Land?

Wednesday, July 10 2013

For urbanites in Philadelphia looking to make a garden from one of the city’s 35,000 or so unused lots, the most common advice has consisted of two words: good luck. That’s because while data on any given parcel is technically open there, actually figuring out who owns it, or if anything can be done with it, can require a spelunking expedition into the dark caverns of city bureaucracy.
Organizers and developers have launched a new project to make it easier to find and utilize vacant land.

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Is This How to Breathe Life Into a City's Vacant Land?

For urbanites in Philadelphia looking to make a garden from one of the city’s 35,000 or so unused lots, the most common advice has consisted of two words: good luck. That’s because while data on any given parcel is technically open there, actually figuring out who owns it, or if anything can be done with it, can require a spelunking expedition into the dark caverns of city bureaucracy.

To bridge this information gap, Cahn teamed with 596 Acres, a Brooklyn based organization that makes online tools to promote land access. Together they created Grounded in Philly. The tool combines unused lot data in Philadelphia onto a map, and provides an informational page for each lot explaining why the property is in the database and other lots it’s close to. It also connects users to resources if they want to organize activity on the lot, and lets them post pictures of what’s going on there.

The project got underway last December with a $36,000 in grants from the Merck Family Fund and the Claneil Foundation. Development absorbed $10,000, and the rest of the grant went towards paying for a community organizer and manager.

“We know that there is this digital component that can hopefully enhance opportunity,” says Cahn, but “we can’t do that without an on-the-ground component as well.”

The project was based on the work 596 Acres had done mapping empty lots for every borough in New York City besides Staten Island, but it was optimized for Philadelphia. Cahn says that a slower real estate market and more lenient land use laws make it easier to set up urban agriculture on a lot in Philadelphia than in New York.

“In New York it’s a much more tenuous thing to be on land when you don’t have permission to be there,” she says.

For turning lots to farms, Philadelphia has another more basic advantage over New York.

“Philly had a lot more vacancies,” says Eric Brelsford, who helped design the project at 596 Acres.

To get a sense of what the community wanted from Grounded in Philly, Cahn and others from GJLI met with local organizations, city council members, and gardeners. It was up to Brelsford to sift through the data.

This turned out to be something of a challenge, which required digging through at least seven different sources of data in Philadelphia, with some bits inside an API, and others in giant shapefiles. To make sense out of what he was seeing, Brelsford talked to people working in the city's water and licensing inspection departments.

“It’s pretty hard to look at it and say ‘Oh, this is a violation for a vacant lot,’” says Brelsford.

He also sought guidance from Philadelphia mapping software company Azavea.

“Every city data source seems to have its own way of defining an address for a piece of land, “ he says, “so we had to try to mush it together, and make a canonical address.”

According to GJLI the site had 1,390 unique visitors and 6,700 page views in the two and a half weeks since it launched. The site has attracted 23 organizers on 39 lots, 10 of which already had gardens in operation. In addition to people choosing properties to watch and organize, 18 users have pointed out developments on 75 lots.

“We know that not all the data is correct,” says Cahn, “but we’re starting to know why and where it’s not correct.” She’s planning a meeting with open data representatives in Philly to help them clean up their data.

In the near term, the Grounded in Philly platform created by 596 Acres is set to expand to Los Angeles and New Orleans with the help from the Knight Foundation prototype fund. One of Brelsford’s colleagues has been in contact with Civic Insights, and says they’ve been helpful.

For Cahn, though, Grounded in Philly is a stepping stone to get more gardens and gardeners organized.

“When I first started in this job I heard that folks engaged in urban agriculture were not a constituency,” she says. “I think we’re starting to prove that wrong.”